Two of the world’s best character actors once worked together as private detectives

In its purest form, Acting is a wonderful game of seeming. If you’re good enough to do this for a living, you come to work every day and slip under the skin of someone you don’t know. You could be someone as harmless as a loving parent or as vicious as a cold-blooded murderer. The job requires you to be a master of empathy; You may not like the person you’re playing, but you have to understand them well enough to make their desires believable, if not relatable, to your audience. It’s a fun, scary tightrope act, and the deeper you get into it, the harder it can be to get out of character.

Of course, this depends on how you approach the craft. If you are a methodically trained actor like Robert DeNiroyou become your character. However, if you’re a practiced fabulist who prefers to play the short game, you can dip in and out of the character with little extrasensory effort. Here, acting can no longer be distinguished from lying. This approach still requires the basic sense of acting that all actors possess, but can be unsettling to outsiders because there is no emotional buy-in. One moment you’re effortlessly enticing a married person into adultery, an hour later you’re lapsing and heading home.

That sounds a bit like a private detective, doesn’t it? Would it surprise you to learn that two of the most talented character actors of the last 30 years once moonlighted in this profession? Maybe not, but you’ll be blown away when you find out which actors have been successful in this industry.

Two weeks ago, Comic writer Ryan Estrada Bluesky went viral when he told his followers that Wayne Knight and Margo Martindale once supplemented their acting income by working for the same detective agency. Yes, Newman from “Seinfeld” And Magazines from “Justified” used their acting talents to possibly catch people in the untruth.

According to Knight, he viewed the job as a side hustle so he wouldn’t have to rely on unemployment. How did he get into this profession? As Knight told Vice in 2015:

“When I started, I was a waitress like everyone else. And I had a friend who said, ‘Well, I have a job you might be interested in.’ I say, ‘Yeah? What is that?’ And he says, “I’m a private investigator.” I say, ‘What? You have no police background. Were you trained for this?’ ‘NO.’ ‘How did you get hired?’ He says, ‘Well, they like to hire actors.’ Because they’re usually intelligent, knowledgeable, can play a variety of roles and have no scruples.’”

Knight’s knack for deception enabled him to answer the phone and arrest unfaithful spouses and, more ambitiously, corporate executives and high-ranking military personnel looking to make money in the world of venture capitalism. He used the nickname “Bill Monty” to keep the ruse going for as long as necessary, and was so successful that in recent decades he has tried to adapt these experiences into a sitcom or film.

As for Martindale, she was far less enthusiastic about the performance. As she told Backstory in 2020“They hired a lot of actors. “I didn’t have very interesting things to do, but all I cared about was getting information out of unsuspecting people for headhunters, jealous husbands and wives who were watching their husbands fooling around.” She added that although the men did occasionally go into the field went, but the women were stuck with work on the phone. If this nasty story can be made into a movie or series, I would rather see it told from Martindale’s perspective.